Open source, work, Hong Kong

Form Tools 3 is primed and ready to become the standard build next month. All the major issues were ironed out in the alpha so as expected, the beta period has been extremely mellow. A few issues have been reported and fixed, but nothing of any great consequence. Unless something remarkable happens I’ll be dropping Form Tools 2 from the download page around the weekend of April 15th.

I’ll also be doing some cleanup. The forums will be closing (end of an era!) and all support will be moved to github. It’s time. Maintaining a forum is a job unto itself, and much as I respect MyBB, none of the plugins I installed were able to fight off the neverending spam – that alone forced me to reconsider why we have the forums going. Once the forums are shut down, finally I’ll be able to get formtools.org off the blacklist from many search engines. Yup, it’s been that bad.

Best of all, I’ll be able to start work on the next release of Form Tools; after all these years, new code at last! FT3 was just a refactor, albeit a massive one. FT3.1 will be rewriting the entire installation and upgrade process so all users will now just download the FT core, and pick and choose what modules + themes they want right within the installation script. This will allow me to drop tens of thousands of lines of code running on formtools.org for the Custom Build script, download package generation, grunt build processes, etc. etc. Best of all it’ll be better for the user.

Work is going well too. I was assigned time to work on a project to investigate and demonstrate the feasibility of moving our client-side codebase to React/Redux, which has been met with approval so far. Let’s see how that all goes, but I’m extremely pleased – this would be a massive improvement for everyone.

Tomorrow I’m off to Hong Kong for the week to go birding so I’ll be mostly incommunicado until I get back and I’m de-jet lagged. I’ve spent the last 3 months swatting up on the birds of Hong Kong, so actually getting to see some of these birds in person is wonderful. Hope my gammy ankle holds up to all the walking I have planned… As always, I’ll post a few of the better pictures I take.